sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems On-Call "Hunt" Group

I’m trying to figure out a way to set up what I call a rotating on-call number for after hours escalation. It would essentially be a DID pointed at a “hunt group” (for lack of a better term) of external numbers. I need this to publish an after-hours support number to our customers. As we do not staff 24x7 support staff, this number needs to rotate thru cell phone numbers until it gets an answer.

I’m told by my vendor support that this isn’t possible and I don’t believe that. It probably requires some creativity, but not impossible. I have had this configured on many different PBXs (Avaya, Mitel, Altigen, etc). It’s never been out-of-the-box easy and usually required some rigging of hunt groups, voicemail config, call forwards, and Find-me features, but I’ve always been able to get a solution that works.

I think this can be accomplished with the right tokens, but I'm not sure.

Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to the board!

First, if you could fill out your profile more completely, so we know who we're helping.

Then, if you give us a detailed description of the phone system make and model, as well as the voice processing system you have. (i.e - Tohsiba DK, CTX, CIX, etc. and Toshiba VM, Teleco VM, etc.)

Thanks,
Tony

Updated my profile a little. Thanks for asking.

Hopefully this will help you:
CIX 670,Version AR5.20 MT009.00
Stratagy Enterprise Server Version IES EC2 4.707.001

I think a lot of things could be accomplish with the right tokens. The biggest obsticale is having the voicemail call a number and know if a person on the other side answers or not. The Vm would typically drop off and transfer the call.

Aside from that, if the call wasn't transfered, and the voicemail could ask the caller to hit 1 or something to comfirm, you could have a sting of mailboxes that chain done to each other. I think I have seen a code posted on another site that would do something like that.

The other item would be if you want the calls to rotate for each call or the same person would alwas get the first call.

Someone will have to spend a bit of time creating it for you and testing.

I've been down this road a couple of times before and it never turns out well. It may work most of the time, but those times that it doesn't work you will hear from the customer. Too many things come into play that will wind up making the caller mad. Disconnects, staff member is out of cell phone range and complains that he never got called, all members have been attempted and none took the call leaving the caller on the line for what they think is eternity only to be offered voicemail. What I suggest is to have the customer leave a message and have voicemail notify the staff one by one until someone checks the message and the voicemail stops notifying.

I have done exactly what phonemeister said, have the caller leave a message and then have the voicemail do a notify. This works really well. We have one customer set up with 8 different mailboxes like this. Each mailbox has a different order of who to call first, second, third, etc. So each week they change the emergency mailbox number depending who is on-call.

Our office used an emergengy mailbox and we changed the oncall phone numbers weekly. We also had backups incase the first person did not answer.

At 2 different doctos offices we had to other solutions. On is we used the auto schedule to change the oncall doctor every day, simular to RRino.

At another I created some token codes where the user could select the oncall doctor by calling into a VM box I created and selcting the dr. on call, by press 1 thru 8.

Thanks everyone. I like that solution alot. Your right, even with the other systems, there was some degree of failure. This solution is more elegant.